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As one of the top — if not *the* top — social-networking sites, Facebook tends to draw a disproportionate amount of criticism from those concerned about the effect the site has on young minds or the welfare of society as a whole. And no one is more concerned about those risks than the various religious groups who routinely try to ban, block or otherwise crack down on the scourge of modern social networking.

The latest to make this kind of move — or at least a threat in that direction — was a group of Islamic clerics who were meeting in Indonesia. They declared that they were contemplating a religious ruling that would issue a “fatwa” or declaration about Facebook, requiring observant Muslims to practice what amounts to “safe social networking” or suffer the wrath of their imam (priest).

In a nutshell, a spokesman for the group said that Facebook and similar sites could be used for appropriate purposes such as education about the faith or keeping in touch with one’s family and friends, but noted that they could also present a temptation.

“The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on virtual networking, because this online relationship could lead to lust, which is forbidden in Islam,” said Nabil Haroen, a spokesman for the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school, which was hosting the event. The head of the council of imams said that the growing number of Facebook users in Indonesia was a controversial subject among Muslim leaders and that he favored a ban because of possible sexual content.

“People using Facebook can be driven to engage in distasteful, pornographic chatting,” said Amidan, who — like most Indonesians — uses only one name. Another spokesman for the clerics said that “spreading ill words about others, gossiping and other things that go against religious teaching on social networking sites in the virtual world are forbidden according to Islamic law.” Despite these protests, one Muslim group on Facebook has 48,000 members, while a Muslim fan page has 18,000 fans.

The Indonesian clerical group’s move would not be the first time the country has stepped in to block social-networking sites for religious reasons. Last year, the country ordered its largest ISPs to block YouTube and MySpace because they both carried an anti-Islam film called Fitna, created by Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders, and the government said that seeing it might “disturb relations between faiths.”

And Muslims aren’t the only religious groups to be concerned about the Internet and the intrusion of social networking into the lives of the faithful. Although Pope Benedict and other senior members of the Catholic clergy have made positive statements about the benefits of the Internet — and even at one point created a Catholic version of Facebook called Xt3.com to appeal to young people — not everyone is quite so sanguine about these new services.

In a recent address to his flock, the Bishop of Paisley, Rt. Rev Philip Tartagliawarned the faithful that “In dialogue with others we need to be wary of the inane chatter that can go on in the digital world which does nothing to promote growth in understanding and tolerance.” He also raised concerns about who young people might contact through the networks, saying: “What parent has not wondered what their child is doing on the internet? What material are they accessing? Who are they talking to in social networking sites?”

Jewish groups have yet to raise any substantial concerns about social networking and its effects from a religious point of view — although there are Orthodox adherents that believe Facebook and similar sites can lure the faithful away from the path of righteousness — but they have become concerned about the use of Facebook as a tool to spread hatred about their faith, including a number of groups that deny the existence of the Holocaust. So far, Facebook has said that it believes the groups fall under the category of freedom of speech, and has resisted efforts to close them.

By now, everyone seems to have become pretty comfortable with the idea that Facebook is a revenue-generating enterprise. Although originally there was a lot of skepticism about whether the social network would be able to produce much revenue, advertising deals with companies like Microsoft (which invested $240-million for 1.6 per cent of the company in 2007) have established that Facebook is definitely producing plenty — as much as $500-million in revenue this year.

What’s even more fascinating, however, is the amount of money that is being generated by the Facebook “ecosystem” — that is, the considerable number of applications, tools and games that are built using Facebook’s F8 platform. According to some estimates (and they are just estimates), app developers as a whole could bring in almost as much or possibly even more revenue this year than Facebook itself.

As Eric Eldon points out, coming up with an overall estimate of what Facebook app developers are making is difficult — if not impossible. Many developers don’t want to say publicly what they bring in, for competitive reasons. But some of the estimates that have appeared, particularly about the largest app developers, are accepted by most observers as being fairly accurate. Zynga, for example, which makes the Texas Hold ‘Em app, is believed to have a “run rate” that would produce revenue this year of about $100-million.

That’s a single developer (although it has multiple apps in its stable). About half of its revenue is estimated to come from its Facebook apps, and the other half from its MySpace businesses. Playfish is expected to make about $30-million this year. In all, Eldon estimates that the top handful of developers make about $150-million, followed by several other tiers of smaller developers who collectively make another $150-million or so. By the end of this year, several sources said that could hit $500-million.

Online gaming industry players told Advertising Age magazine the same thing, with many of them estimating developer revenue could hit $500-million or more. “It wouldn’t surprise me if apps on Facebook generate more revenue this year than Facebook,” LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy told the magazine. LivingSocial currently has the number one most popular Facebook app, “Pick Your Five.” Mark Pincus of Zynga recently wrote up some of his tips on how to make money through Facebook apps for the Facebook developers blog.

One interesting thing to note is that Zynga and several other developers make money in a variety of ways — not just through banner advertising, as many online media outlets do, but also through CPA (cost per action) payments, as well as the sale of virtual goods. In Zynga’s case, the company makes about a third of its revenue from the sale of poker chips for its Texas Hold ‘Em games. The virtual goods market is one that is already well established in other countries: in China, for example, gaming company Tencent made $1-billion in revenue from the sale of goods and services in its virtual world, including clothing for avatars.

Is there a lesson here for other companies such as Twitter, which is searching for revenue-generating opportunities for its fast-growing service? Clearly, there is. If you can build a social network that attracts the kind of devoted users that Facebook has, and in large enough numbers, you can generate substantial amounts of revenue both for yourself and your partners. And if Facebook is developing an integrated payment system (as it is rumoured to be), the revenue potential could be set to explode.

The popular perception of the Internet is that it is inherently global in nature, an international network that is just as open and accessible regardless of what country you happen to be in, or what language you speak. And for the most part (with the exception of some totalitarian states such as China) that is the case. However, the keys to this particular kingdom belong to one country: namely, the U.S., through its control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Some critics don’t like that state of affairs, and are trying to change it — including the Information Commission of the European Union, Viviane Reding. The EU official said this week that ICANN should not be overseen by the U.S. government (the agency operates under an agreement with the Commerce Department), but should be run democratically by a group of states. While the U.S. has done a good job of managing the process, she said, “in the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an Internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.”

ICANN, as it is called, is the non-profit entity that controls the Internet’s entire domain name structure — including the creation of new “top-level” domains such as .xxx and .mobi — and is in charge of handing out domain names and IP addresses. It manages this process through a separate entity known as IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which controls the 13 root nameservers that translate domain names and URLs into IP addresses. Until relatively recently, these DNS servers were all located in the United States, in most cases inside government offices.

The EU commissioner said in her recent address that she hopes President Obama continues with the Clinton administration’s plan to privatize ICANN, and she suggested that a perfect opportunity for such a move is coming in September, when the agency’s agreement with the U.S. government expires. Among other things, Reding said that she would like ICANN to be regulated by an international tribunal (any legal disputes involving the agency are currently handled by the courts in California, since it is located there).

There have been discussions in the past about the United Nations taking over control of ICANN, and other EU critics have requested that the European Union investigate the U.S. agency for restraint of trade because of its control of the plumbing of the Internet. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has also criticized ICANN.

Will the September expiry of the U.S. government’s deal with ICANN be the opportunity that Viviane Reding and others are hoping for? Will the international community — either the EU itself or the UN — take control over the reins of the Internet? There certainly seems to be increasing interest in doing so, and the Obama administration is ideologically a lot closer to the previous Clinton government, which had begun the process toward releasing ICANN from its government associations. All that remains is for the last ties to be cut, and for the agency to become as international as the Internet whose plumbing it manages.

If climate-change experts are correct in thinking that we could be close to a “tipping point” that might accelerate the already substantial climate change we’ve seen to date, the pressure to find solutions is sure to intensify. One of the potential mitigating factors is something that economists and scientists like to call “dematerialization.” Simply put, this is the process by which products and services with greater environmental impact are gradually replaced by those with less impact. As Wikipedia defines it, the term refers to the absolute or relative reduction in the quantity of materials required to serve economic functions in society.

Theoretically, the IT industry should be a great contributor to this effect or process, for a variety of reasons. For example, computers have gotten a lot smaller, cheaper and more efficient, in terms of computing power per watt of energy, etc. As this piece from Hewlett-Packard notes, the fastest computer in 1946 performed about 5,000 operations a second, weighed more than 30 tons, and consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electricity. In contrast, an off-the-shelf laptop purchased today has thousands of times the processing power, weighs just a few pounds, and consumes less than one-thousandth the electricity.

This effect can have related “rebound” effects, however, as a number of researchers have noted. The fact that electronic devices including computers have become smaller and cheaper to both buy and operate means that there are also a lot more of them, as this paper points out, and can contribute to a consumer attitude of ”replace rather than repair.” As the researchers note, while dematerialization “may be the case on a per-unit basis, the increasing number of units produced can cause an overall trend toward materialization with time.” And then there are all-new devices as well: according to Apple, the lifecycle carbon footprint of an iPhone involves the emission of 121 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions over the course of a three year expected lifetime of use.

While IT services might lead to improvements in a number of ways — thanks to developments such as videoconferencing, telework, and electronic commerce — it’s difficult to draw a straight line connecting these services to an overall reduction in environmental impact, according to some scientists who have looked at the issue. While IT can improve the efficiency of existing operations and create new, more efficient ways of doing the same things, “having the means to use less materials does not mean that they will be adopted, nor does it guarantee that their adoption will actually lead to dematerialization.” As an example, despite the arrival of personal computers and other electronic services such as email, the total consumption of paper has doubled since 1950.

So while dematerialization has promise as a mitigating factor in climate change — and the contributions of the IT industry on that score are many — it is far from being a panacea, since the effects of such changes in the IT business can be more than counterbalanced by contrary activity elsewhere in the global economy.

So America has a new “Chief Technology Officer” (although the actual name of the position is Associate Director for Technology in the Office of Science and Technology Policy). Aneesh Chopra, formerly Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, didn’t get any resounding cheers from the hardcore geeks — in part because he isn’t from the center of the geek-o-sphere, Silicon Valley — but even having the position at all is a big step up from previous administrations, so most industry observers are fairly positive about the appointment. But will the position become simply a platform for simplistic solutions, such as a broadband-for-all policy, as some fear, or will it have broader and more far-reaching effects, as some are recommending?

Those who are hoping for more depth than a simple broadband rollout strategy will likely be pinning their hopes on the newly announced President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a non-policy making body that President Obama named on Monday. Perhaps the most prominent name on the list is Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. As one observer noted, it wasn’t that long ago that the search-engine giant was seen as an outsider in Washington, with little or no ties to the government and no real influence. That has definitely changed with the arrival of Barack Obama and his technology-friendly White House.

The full PCAST roll call (the complete list is here) also includes Craig Mundie, the Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft Corporation; Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission; James Gates Jr., director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, and Rosina Bierbaum, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. Breadth is something that the Obama administration seems to have more or less covered, since the list Includes specialists and experts in chemistry, physics, biology, geology, computer science, engineering, environmental science, astrophysics and internal medicine.

The President said that the PCAST board would be charged with advising him “about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation.” Some hope that Schmidt and Mundie will be able to sway Obama on the topic of net neutrality, something both are interested in. And those hoping for a broad mandate can also take comfort in the fact that the government has pledged to spend 3 per cent of the country’s GDP, or about $415.2-billion, on science and technology research, development and education — the largest financial commitment in America’s history (larger even than the original moon-shot space program). Among other things, Obama has proposed doubling the budgets for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Could these kinds of investments be jeopardized by the shaky economy? No doubt. But the President has made it clear that investment in science and technology research and development is a priority for his government, and he arguably has an advisory group with enough intellectual heft and real-world experience to make it a reality.